by Allison Rios
“You were a good person, Rae,” he said.
“A good person and a sane person are not mutually exclusive,” she said. “After that last visit, I knew I had crossed a line. Sleeping with you after crying to you over Aaron, then walking away the next day without even talking about it. Awful. I was an awful human being, James! Then I went back to my life in college, and you went back to yours. I tried to ignore everything you did to reconnect. I wanted to sever the ties between us.”
“You did pretty well.”
“Yeah, until about six weeks later.”
She squirmed around in a search for the right words.
“James, that’s when I found out I was pregnant.”
“And?”
“And you were the only man I had slept with at the time.”
Chapter 28
Tuesday, October 6
Realization swept over him. The oxygen around him disappeared and he struggled to catch his breath. The alternate reality she had just dropped in his lap grew exponentially, and he spit out the only words he could muster.
“Rae, what are you talking about?”
“I’m so sorry James, I just couldn’t go through with raising a baby.”
James pushed himself further away from her on the truck bed and struggled to catch his breath.
“So you had an abortion without telling me? I would have been there for you. You wouldn’t have had to go through everything alone! We had family, friends.” He couldn’t fathom the notion that he’d been so close to fatherhood at least once in his life.
“I didn’t have an abortion. You’re not listening to what I’m saying,” she continued. “I wasn’t thinking about anyone but myself.”
He tried to catch her gaze, but she shifted away from him. The injuries limited his movements, and he gripped the truck bed with both hands to balance. His heart pounded out a rushed rhythm of disapproval, and he struggled to find strength as thoughts about having missed the chance to watch his child grow up ravaged his mind.
“I didn’t have an abortion,” she continued.
“You didn’t?”
That signature lip bite told him what she couldn’t.
“That’s the baby you had? We have a child together?” Words she’d shared with him just days before began to register. “The one you gave up for adoption? We have a kid and we don’t even know boy or girl, do we?”
She reached out and he avoided her touch as though it might set him on fire. She’d burned him before on various levels, but this indiscretion had crossed the line.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so very sorry, James.”
“Sorry?” he yelled. “Sorry? You’re sorry? That’s what you’re going to say right now? Are you kidding me, Rae?” He attempted to stand up. When his body wouldn’t respond to his need to immediately get up and walk away, he threw a crutch in anger as far as he could, watching it touch down in the tall grass a few yards away. “There are only two things I've ever wanted in my life: you and a child of our own. Now you're telling me I had both, and what, lost both? I can forgive a lot of things, but this?”
“You don’t need to forgive me,” she said.
“You’re damn right I don’t,” he said as he held onto the truck bed and worked his way to the driver’s seat before turning around to yell some more. “And you’re sorry? Like that’s supposed to just fix it all? Make me forget I have a kid out there somewhere?”
He stopped just short of the driver’s side door before inhaling deeply and forcing himself to speak slowly and clearly.
“For years I’ve sat here and waited for you. I’ve been living with this guilt that I’m married to one woman and in love with another. The guilt that I’d never have a kid of my own. I don't mean to slight Ruth at all, but she's not mine. She's Brian's, and though I love her like a daughter, I want to know what it's like to be there for my kid's first steps, first words. I’ve wanted so badly to hear someone call me daddy. I’ve reached out to you and held out hope that we weren’t finished yet. This feeling has been sitting in my heart since the moment you walked away the first time, Rae, that there is still something holding us together. I’ve fought it and hated it and loved it and resented it and everything in between, but no matter what, it’s never left. It’s a part of me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have someone next to you in bed wearing a ring you gave her as you promised to love her forever, all while you’re wondering where your ex is and how they’re doing? I’ve always felt like our story wasn’t finished. I’ve felt like there’s some reason we’re meant to be a part of each other’s lives, and now I find out that it wasn’t my love for you that kept us tied together; it’s a child!”
“James –”
“Don’t!” he yelled. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Sorry is when you lose someone’s coat or lie about dinner plans.
Not when you give their kid away!”
The sweat found its way to his skin and dizziness set in. He wanted to hate her. Somehow, he found the mere thought even more disgusting than the secret she’d just shared.
“I would have taken care of you, Rae. Of you and our child.”
“We were kids, James!”
“You could have given me the opportunity to raise him or her. How hard would that have been to have given me a choice? With or without you!”
“I couldn’t come back here with a baby, hand it to you, and walk away!”
“Why, Rae? Because it would make you look bad? Because it would have been too hard? You stayed in California and gave away our baby to strangers? Is this easier for you? This isn’t some damn class ring you’ve taken away from me. It’s my own flesh and blood. Do you even care?”
“Yes, I care!” she said as the tears unleashed their sorrow before him.
“Then tell me why! Tell me the real reason!”
“I came to tell you I was pregnant and I saw you with Katie,” she said. Tears crested and he watched the heartbreak of more than a decade dash down her cheeks. “I saw you with her, I saw you proposing, and I knew that she would be better for you than I ever could be. She had to be if you proposed so soon after meeting her. You had sent me an email just before I came saying you met someone, but I didn’t realize it was that serious. I may never have responded, but I lied when I said I didn’t read it. I read everything you sent. You had a chance at a life far better than anything I could give you, and I knew it when I saw the two of you. You looked so happy. I thought if I came back and told you I was pregnant, you would lose Katie.”
“But I would have had you,” he barked.
“You met Katie right after we slept together – do you really think she would have wanted to raise our baby?”
“You had no right to make that decision for us, Rae! Hell, it could have saved my marriage!”
“I know now how stupid every decision I made was, but I can’t take it back. I wish I could, James. I came back here this weekend to right the wrongs I’ve done, and this is one of them.”
His anger pulsed through his veins and his heart beat as though it might explode. The shock from the sheer enormity of her confession drowned out all other sound.
“How can you right this wrong, Rae? Katie and I, we struggled for years to have a child. Month after month, year after year, every negative pregnancy test and failed procedure and fertility bill we couldn’t afford to pay. Depression and anxiety and bankruptcy and disappointment filling every moment of every day because we both felt like we were letting the other down. I couldn’t be the husband she deserved because I couldn’t give her the family she wanted. You know what could have saved that marriage? The opportunity to raise a baby. Not Ruth, not someone else’s toddler, but a baby we could hold in our arms from the moment he or she was born. So what? So I end up with nothing? Not you, not Katie, not my own child?”
“I can’t take it back, James,” she said softly. “I know what I did was wrong. It was wrong on a level I didn’t even know existed until I had the years and the tim
e to look back on it clearly. I keep making decisions that I think are best for everyone involved and come to find out I’m hurting everyone more than helping. I knew you would hate me for it and that’s why I couldn’t tell you. You spent this weekend saying that you love me and that you want to be with me and your words made it so much harder to tell you the truth. But my truth is that my pain is only temporary. I’ve weighed what would be more painful for you; to know or to never know. But you deserve to know, James. You deserve to have the whole truth. You deserve to know that you have a child and that I will love you for the rest of my days. My heart will break each and every moment knowing the pain I’ve caused in your life.”
James listened to her words and let them filter into his thoughts as he sought to quell the intense anger that had taken up residence in his soul. A baby wouldn’t have changed how he felt about Katie, and he knew that. A child would have made their time together perhaps less tense, though they likely would have found other things to fight about. Seeing a replica of Rae would have made him miss her more, too, but he would have been willing to undergo that pain to have a family of his own.
The emptiness that had built a home within him over the years seemed to grow tenfold with every second spent thinking about missing out on the life of his child.
“All these years I’ve wondered what it would be like to be a father, Rae. Not an uncle raising his niece, but an actual father. I’ve wondered what it would be like to have a family photo with a wife and a child. Do you know how many times I’ve dreamt that I walk in the door to you and a house full of little ones running around, welcoming me home? I lost count years ago. I don’t even know.”
“You don’t know what, James?”
“I don’t know how to understand this or accept this loss. How can you miss something so much when you never even had it to begin with?”
She stood timidly next to the truck, her pain more evident with every tear.
“You get to come home, tell me you’re sick, and confess that you’ve stolen something huge from my life and then what? You get to leave, and I’m left knowing I have a kid out there that I’ll never see? What am I supposed to do? Walk into some teen’s life and destroy whatever perfect life they have? Or do nothing and have them find me after they turn eighteen, asking why I just abandoned them? What do you expect? Do you expect forgiveness? You get off easy, and I get to live with this every moment of every day for the rest of my life?”
“I don’t want forgiveness,” she said. “I just wanted you to know. I told you, I wasn’t a good person then and I hardly qualify as such now.”
“Stop!” he barked at her. “You don’t get a pity party now. You don’t get to wallow in this. Get in the truck.”
“I can’t.”
“Fine,” he said. “Stay here then. Another incredibly bad decision on your part, but I guess that’s the only decision you know how to make.”
He turned the rearview mirror as his tires spit up gravel, simply so he didn’t have to watch her silhouette fade away in the distance.
Chapter 29
Wednesday, October 7
Before his truck disappeared on the horizon, rain began to bounce off the windshield. The pellets stung along her skin in an antagonizing dance of “I told you so.” She barely noticed the tears on her already soaked cheeks.
She hadn’t expected a better ending. She’d prepared herself at home for a reaction even worse during the many rehearsals done in front of her bathroom mirror. Being home and having heard him tell her how he felt in the previous days, however, had left her with the hope that somehow he’d have it in him to forgive her.
She began the walk back to her parent’s home, and the tears continued to fall. The anger, fear, and self-loathing had built up behind a delicate wall mortared with false bravado. She’d kept it up through treatments and the worry of tomorrow, yet the broken love from years before brought down the safety net with a one-man army.
The rain wasn’t good for her. The struggle to keep healthy was stressful enough without the added forces of nature. She attempted to quicken her pace before coming to a halt beside a giant oak she climbed many times as a child. Though some branches hung overhead without life running through them, the tree still loomed mightily above the earth and provided shelter from everything but her thoughts.
She didn’t want to die yet, but she was ready. She had been putting off the acceptance of her fate until she could tie up all the loose ends. Telling James had been her final check mark, and she honestly couldn’t fathom going on for months or years with the pain left in her heart.
Rae sat down alongside the base of the tree with clothes soaked and clinging to her slim figure. She pulled her knees up to her chest and let the sobs fall. She wanted to stay there for however long the rest of her forever was and let nature choose the ending.
Rae shivered as a cold front swept in and, exhausted, drifted to sleep against a tree that had protected her so often during her youth.
When she awoke, no grass sat beneath her as a cushion and the tree bark had been replaced by pillows. The wet clothing had been swapped for an oversized – and dry – white t-shirt. She had no idea where she was and wondered if maybe, just maybe, wherever she was could be the place a person goes when they die.
She pushed the warm blankets aside and lowered her feet cautiously to the floor. No pictures donned the walls, and the rooms were bare. In fact, there was hardly any furniture to speak of. Rae rounded the corner and felt an inkling of fear gurgle up in her throat each time she stepped into a new room.
Through the next doorway, she saw a stove and followed the smell of a freshly made breakfast.
“Morning,” James said as he flipped an egg in the skillet.
She stared from him to the food and back to the room she had just come from.
“Did you sleep okay?”
She nodded as she processed what had happened. She again turned her focus to the doorway leading outside, and he must have noticed.
“Your mom knows you’re here. And you can leave whenever you’d like.”
“How did I get here?” she asked.
“I talk a lot bigger than I act,” James said, somewhat chuckling at his own weakness. “I came back. Carried you to the truck and you only woke up for a second before falling back asleep. I let the girls know you wouldn’t be meeting them, and I had your mom come over and check on you. She brought your medicine and left it over there on the counter,” he said as he pointed to his right and took a seat at the table. “One said you need to take it with food, so I’m making something. It’s not much because I’m not a good cook, but it’s pretty hard to ruin breakfast.”
“After what I did, you came back for me?”
“Let’s just admit that we’re both assholes. I’m the one who left a sick woman in the rain on the side of the road.”
He smiled, and something inside her changed. For the first time in longer than she could remember, life flowed through her veins again. She didn’t feel out of breath. The forgiveness that one person could hold redeemed everything she’d been burdened with. A sense of renewal washed over her.
“You carried me? How?”
She tried to envision the broken and bandaged man struggling to lift her from her dampened resting place.
“I just did. I saw you there soaking wet and curled up, and
I don’t know, I just knew I had to get you home.”
She glanced around at the small and outdated kitchen.
“Is Ruth here?”
“No,” he replied. “She’s with my mom and dad.”
“So what now?” Rae asked. She slid into an empty chair by the makeshift table.
“I don’t know, Rae,” he replied. “I’m just trying to make it through today. Right now, that’s no easy task.” She flinched, and the anxiety began to creep back. James set his book on the table and rose to the stove to check on the bacon.
She watched him as he cooked. The boy she’d known had become a man;
not just any man, but a man with a bigger heart than she’d ever known possible. He looked muscular and overwhelming despite the cast and the bandages wrapped around his torso.
“I can do that,” she offered.
“I’ve got it.”
“Shouldn’t you have your crutches? You shouldn’t be standing on that leg.”
“I’m missing a crutch,” he said as he glanced back at her with a smirk.
Before she could filter any of the words about to spill forth, her voice erupted in a promise she wasn’t sure she could keep.
“I want to help. I want to help you find your child.”
She watched as he turned towards her. A grin swept across his face, and the edges of her mouth itched to do the same.
“Our child.”
She wanted to correct him and say his child again, but she thought better of the notion. No need to upset him further.
When he realized she meant it, he turned down the stove and carefully chose his next words.
“So where do we start?” He hobbled over and set a plate of food in front of her. “With the adoption agency?”
“I guess,” she replied. “I’ve never really thought about actually doing it, so I’m not sure.”
“What was the name of the agency?”
“I don’t know,” she replied sheepishly. She noted the look of sheer resentment on James’ face. “I swear, I’m not trying to make this difficult. I will have to go back and find if I have any papers on it when I get back to Chicago. I can’t even promise I kept them, but I’ll do my best to try and find out.” He didn’t hide his displeasure. “I just tried to forget it all, James. I think all we can do is give the agency our names saying that if our child searches for us, they can release our information.”